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- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!

Sunday, November 23, 2008

The Los Angeles Timesreports that Hollywood's left-wing activist community is preparing to boycott individuals and companies who contributed to California's Proposition 8:

Should there be boycotts, blacklists, firings or de facto shunning of those who supported Proposition 8?

That's the issue consuming many in liberal Hollywood who fought to defeat the initiative banning same-sex marriage and are now reeling with recrimination and dismay. Meanwhile, activists continue to comb donor lists and employ the Internet to expose those who donated money to support the ban.

The piece discusses the case of Richard Raddon of Film Independent, a production company. Raddon is Mormon. He gave $1,500 to the Prop 8 campaign.

Raddon has been a particularly polarizing figure because Film Independent's board includes many independent film stalwarts, including Don Cheadle, Forest Whitaker, Fox Searchlight President Peter Rice and Oscar-winning writer Bill Condon. One of the group's explicit missions is to promote diversity.

Last week, Raddon offered to resign. According to one board member, a conference call was hastily arranged, and after much discussion the board voted unanimously to keep him.

Yet the anger continues to stew.

"There is still roiling debate within the organization," says distributor Howard Cohen, an advisor to the film festival who is gay. "Is it OK to let this go? There are a lot of gay people who work at Film Independent. The issue has not been closed."

No one is certain how the current protest will affect Film Independent's Spirit Awards in the spring, a popular event recognizing work that "challenges the status quo." And there are already indications the Los Angeles Film Festival could be affected.

Gregg Araki, director of the critically acclaimed gay cult hit "Mysterious Skin" and an influential figure in "new queer cinema," has said he won't allow his films to be shown there, while others, such as "Milk" producers and gay activists Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, say they're going to "study in depth all the facets of our specific situation before making a decision."

Araki says Raddon should step down. "I don't think he should be forcibly removed. The bottom line is if he contributed money to a hateful campaign against black people, or against Jewish people, or any other minority group, there would be much less excusing of him. The terrible irony is that he runs a film festival that is intended to promote tolerance and equality."

Others are leery of punishing free speech, even if they consider it hateful. "I can't quite stomach the notion that you fire somebody because of what they believe. It doesn't feel right to me," says Christine Vachon, a pillar of gay cinema who produced such films as "Boys Don't Cry" and "Far From Heaven."

Raddon declined to comment, but Dawn Hudson, executive director of Film Independent, says, "Are we happy with his donation? No. But he has a right to his religious and personal beliefs.

And that's the point: Gay activists don't respect Raddon's rights, his political beliefs, or his religion. The movement's totalitarian, and many inside the industry are recoiling against the gay liberal extremism.

Let me say this - just because you didn’t support gay marriage doesn’t make you homophobic and certainly doesn’t make someone a bigot. Gays already have the right to marry. Nobody is denying them that. They simply do not have the extra right to marry someone of their own sex.

So ... it’s really about having an extra right granted to them that other people don’t have.

Anyway, these people are actively going after anyone they can show to have supported Proposition 8 and that, folks, is genuinely scary stuff. It’s even making many in the gay community uncomfortable ...

Yes, all of this is making a lot of reasonable people uncomfortable, and that's exactly what the gay rights ayatollahs want. They'll harass, heckle, and hound Americans of good will until they feel so terrorized they'll simply give up the fight, capitulating to a creeping left-wing authoritarianism bubbling-up from depths of the nihilist Democratic Party base.

6
comments:

Very scary. I think this leap from being an advocate of traditional marriage to a bigot the equivalent of slavery is ridiculous. It frightens me to think that any group can persuade through intimidation and yet they do and they are. And Hollywood decried McCarthyism...laughable. Nice job. :)N

Yet what is rational about equating people seeking equality with fundamentalist Islamic leaders and terrorists? You also claim that gays were seeking an "extra right." Yet prop 8 specifically attempted to strip a right that same-sex couples in California had. How can you claim that an effort to stop someone from taking away a right is the same as seeking an "extra" right? ANd are you really so glib as to suggest that gay people marry someone of the opposite sex? Someone other than the person with whom they wish to share their life? Such a suggestion is smug and insulting.

But who is being terrorized? How about the Mormons that are being attacked for supporting Prop 8 and the Church of Latter-day Saints being investigated for "violating state election law"? Or the guy in the story itself people wanting him to be fired and quit his job because he supported?

This is little more then California trying to bypass a law that was passed an enacted that a few extremist don't agree with. Like last time a same-sex marriage ban was passed and that judge married same sex couple anyways.